> The way this is intended to be addressed in free markets is through competition
"Free market competition" is an ideological construct. Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go work somewhere else" - and we certainly can't not-work at all. Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it operates, impact of its products and services on society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding another 'stall' in the 'market'.
> This has been happening increasingly in the US because corporations capture the government,
The government exists to serve the interests of property owners, and more so, the larger ones - enforcing the social order and protecting their minority control of economic forces, the means of producing and distributing goods and services, from the rest of surrounding society.
Capture by certain corporation is an attempt to tug at that common blanket to favor them specifically rather than keep the system somewhat stable and functional.
> Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go work somewhere else"
If Company A sucks and there are many other companies that don't, every single employee at Company A could quit and go work somewhere else, and then Company A can go out of business. That's a completely reasonable outcome for a company that sucks, and is what happens when there is actually competition.
> and we certainly can't not-work at all.
No known system satisfies the criterion that we all collectively don't have to work.
> Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it operates, impact of its products and services on society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding another 'stall' in the 'market'.
These are not the "Soviet Shoe Factory" issue, they're externalities. If the company tries to make only baby shoes to save material but people want adult shoes and competition exists then people buy adult shoes from somewhere else and the shoe factory making unnecessary baby shoes goes out of business or doesn't have the perverse incentive to do that to begin with.
If the company is dumping toxins in the river, that isn't one of the problems that competition is expected to fix, in the same way that it isn't expected to prevent thefts or murders. And it's also not a problem the Soviets fixed either.
It's a question of degree yes people aren't going to move across the country for a slightly better job but if the difference becomes big enough they do.
Not only that, for it to even happen you'd need one of two things:
1) You have a very specific skillset which has such a high market value that you're not willing to change roles, but is esoteric enough that there are no other local employers for that skillset even though there are plenty of local employers in general. This is obviously not the common case, and is generally not a huge problem, because the "victim" is someone who can still command high wages and extract concessions from the monopolist because they still have the ability to switch roles and get a job doing something else for someone else.
2) There are not plenty of local employers in general. This is the aforementioned problem case where the incumbents capture the government and use it to inhibit competition, which must be prevented.
It had a market where consumers could choose to spend their money on particular brands of consumer goods, with varying degrees of quality.
There weren't a lot of different brands, but there were some, and they were in direct competition with eachother. The bigger issue was overall low productivity and high logistics friction, which leads to shortages (and a MIC that sucked up half the country's productive output didn't help matters).
It's so funny that we still have to debate these things when Lenin wrote "Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism" over a hundred years ago about a society that was far less concentrated than what we have today. Capitalism trends towards consolidation with the exception of a "new market" environment where it appears more in its Adam Smith sense. This rapidly melts away into oligopoly as weaker firms lose to stronger firms. Eventually, the domestic market is not enough to sustain growth and firms induce politicians to carve up the world for them to divide the world into intentionally underdeveloped areas of cheap production and areas of consumption.
The trouble with this critique is that it takes as a premise that you have a government which is enforcing at least contracts and property rights, but not antitrust laws. Without the former you can't have a monopoly because people would just take the monopolist's stuff (though of course then you have different problems). With the latter, contracts for anti-competitive mergers are illegal and consolidated markets get broken up.
The general problem, which is not limited to capitalism, is that organizations try to consolidate power. So you need something to inhibit that. What this is supposed to look like is a limited government that can enforce antitrust laws against other organizations, but is constrained from itself becoming an organization that consolidates power. This requires strong checks and balances, and they clearly need to be more robust than the ones currently in place. Not least because several of the ones originally in place under the US constitution have been removed through amendments (e.g. 17th) or creative interpretation (e.g. Wickard).
>Free market competition" is an ideological construct. Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go work somewhere else" - and we certainly can't not-work at all. Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it operates, impact of its products and services on society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding another 'stall' in the 'market'.
In a natural world, "collectively" is easier than "personally". You might have some reason that you absolutely can't quit, but there will be other employees who don't have that handicap. Their pressure will be enough to keep the employer reasonable for you too, since there are probably more of them than there are people who can't leave like you. But even if no one can realistically go get another job, that's not the true pressure... the true pressure is that they're so awful you'd all just quit despite how awful that will be for you, despite your inability to get a new job.
In a natural world with well-cultivated libertarian tendencies, the threshold for "fuck you I'd rather starve than put up with your bullshit" is pretty low. This is why companies (and government) are so eager to do everything they can to undermine libertarian tendencies... it makes everyone more vulnerable. Not that anyone understands this. The modern impulse when abuse takes place is to try to goad mommy government into coming to the rescue, which further erodes libertarian attitudes. They need you vulnerable, they need it to be such that if you have problems only they can solve them. If they can contrive that to be the case, they get to decide whether or not they want the problems solved at all.
"Free market competition" is an ideological construct. Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go work somewhere else" - and we certainly can't not-work at all. Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it operates, impact of its products and services on society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding another 'stall' in the 'market'.
> This has been happening increasingly in the US because corporations capture the government,
The government exists to serve the interests of property owners, and more so, the larger ones - enforcing the social order and protecting their minority control of economic forces, the means of producing and distributing goods and services, from the rest of surrounding society.
Capture by certain corporation is an attempt to tug at that common blanket to favor them specifically rather than keep the system somewhat stable and functional.